


Five Ways Peggy Carter Dies

by quigonejinn



Category: Captain America (2011), Marvel (Movies), The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-05-29
Updated: 2012-05-29
Packaged: 2017-11-06 06:29:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,215
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/415819
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/quigonejinn/pseuds/quigonejinn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>One way: <i>old and gray and full of sleep</i>.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Five Ways Peggy Carter Dies

**Author's Note:**

> Warnings for gore and general unpleasantry. The last one makes no sense if you haven't seen the Avengers movie.

1\. 

Old and gray and full of sleep, surrounded by children and grandchildren. 

2\. 

A crevasse in the mountains. The SSR wants one of its own on the ground when they bring Zola in, so Peggy, not Bucky, is second on the zipline after Captain America. It isn't her first time on a HYDRA train, so she knows the trick about the centrally controlled doors being used to separate members of a party. She warns Steve on the roof of the train; when they get inside, she goes through first, and he follows. When Zola pulls the switch, Steve is ready. He shoves the shield up to wedge the door open, slides under, retrieves his shield, and they take care of the gunmen in the one compartment, then tackle the man in the energy suit in the other. 

When Cap gets blown aside, Peggy picks up the shield and returns fire an the energy blast knocks her off the train. 

Bucky sits with Steve in the bombed-out pub; they say nothing to each other. 

Seventy years later, Steve wakes from what feels like a continuous dream of Peggy screaming as she falls. 

3\. 

On a street in Prague, ten years after the war. Peggy had been working in West Germany under the cover of being a low-level floating secretary at the British consulate, something that leaves her plenty of time in the field. They send her behind the Curtain to facilitate a prize intelligence asset coming in from the cold, and it turns out to be a trap from beginning to end. She has come onto the Red Room's radar in a bad way, a major way, and the last forty-eight hours of her life are a blur of controlled panic and suppressed fear and running from blown safehouse to blown safehouse. Their network in Czechoslovakia has been utterly and completely compromised. How long has the Red Room been sitting on this? How badly did they want to catch her? 

She is half-walking, half-running down a street in Prague, trying to get to the train station where she might be able to smuggle herself into Austria, but a delivery van jumps the curb and pins her to the wall. People run, screaming. The ground on either side of the crash is littered with shoes, hats, baskets, luggage, all dropped by fleeing people.

The driver of the van gets out: a workman in overalls. 

He pulls a gun out of his pocket. 

"Hello, Peggy," he says. Does he actually remember her? 

A bubble of blood pops on Peggy's mouth, and her lungs are filling with blood. It spills down her mouth, soaks into the collar of her dress. She struggles, feebly, and Bucky, now with a metal arm, shoots her once in each eye socket, to send the message home. 

4\. 

Old, gray, and full of sleep, but before that, she spends some time in a room where the walls are tiled and the floor is slopes towards the drain in the middle. Bucky runs her down in Prague, but only uses the delivery van to box her in: in this universe, the Red Room isn't ready to send a message quite yet. A half-dozen men melt out of the crowd and pull guns on her. She puts her hands in the air and says, _I surrender_ first in Czech, then in Russian for clarity's sake because a few of the men look itchy on the trigger finger, because she left a good three or four of their co-workers dead in her forty-eight hour run. 

Then, when she sees the Winter Soldier leaning against the hood of the car and says it, slowly, in English. 

They look at each other. Does he remember her?

Eventually, she ends up in the tiled room, tied to a chair. The right side of her face is a mess of blood and bruising; they have kept her continuously for a very, very long time, throwing cold water over her whenever she starts to fall asleep sleep. Her clothes are wet; she has stopped shivering. Eventually, Peggy broke because eventually, everyone breaks. Eventually, too, she'll be traded back for some prisoners that the NATO has picked up. She still has friend back home, and her friends have people or bodies that the Kremlin wants back. 

In the meantime, Bucky comes back into the room. He is wearing a Soviet Army uniform. There is also a woman with him, just a little more than a girl. Red hair, dressed in a white blouse and a long black skirt. Black shoes, too, that look like what a ballet dancer would wear. Bucky puts his hands behind his back, and the girl, who doesn't look more than fifteen until Peggy sees her eyes, takes the cover off a tray of tools. She steps close to Peggy and forces Peggy's up, Peggy's mouth open: there are pliers in her the girl's right hand as she practices taking out a cyanide tooth. They know she doesn't have one. They must know. Wouldn't she have used it already if she had one? 

"Sloppy," Bucky says in Russian "You're giving her a chance to bite you."

The girl snorts, but takes Peggy's mouth more firmly in hand, brings the pliers in, and the last thing Peggy sees before she passes out and is woken up again for further practice -- belt buckle and two red triangles on a black background. 

5\. 

Peggy is still alive. 

Bucky runs her to ground in Prague; six men pull guns on her because she has proven the degree to which she is dangerous, and she hadn't even been cornered when she murdered three men in the space of five minutes. Peggy has a memory of surrendering because she expected to be tortured and broken, then exchanged; she has another memory of being strapped to a gurney and loaded onto a plane and flying a very long way, but years pass. Her memories grow unmoored, partially because she has lived such a long time, full of pain and violence, partially because she has been ordered to forget. Partially, too, because there is something inside that is still trying to protect her. Who had she been surrendering to? Where had the plane been going, and where did it land? 

A belt. Two red triangles on a black background. A room with tile on the walls and a drain in the middle and her, screaming for hours that turn into days that turn into weeks, and then she stops screaming beca -- 

She lives for a long time, and in the course of living for a long time, things change. Things shift. Bodies are re-made. 

Now, she is on the deck of a ship. There is sunshine in her hair, and she is wearing a red shirt and dark blue jeans. She dyes her hair now, and two men come off the plane. One of them, she likes and trusts. She knows him very well, and he goes off to do his job. She doesn't know the other one at all, but he calls her _Ma'm_ , and sunlight catches on his shoulders. He has a handsome face and surprisingly kind eyes. 

She tilts her head a few degrees and considers. 

Why does she suddenly think of dancing?

**Author's Note:**

> Yeah, no, the first line and the line from the summary are from [Yeats](http://www.bartleby.com/101/863.html), because I love Yeats. And I am such a hardcore Peggy/Steve shipper, I can't even tell you, even though that poem is not-so-secretly kind of dickish, you know? I STAND BY THE FACT THAT ONE WOMAN LOVED THE PILGRIM SOUL IN YOU, STEVE. 
> 
> [Destronomics](http://archiveofourown.org/users/destronomics/pseuds/destronomics) came up with the idea of Peggy being tied to a chair so that Natasha can train, and then Bucky telling her that she is being _sloppy_. [Destronomics](http://archiveofourown.org/users/destronomics/pseuds/destronomics) is the worst/best/awesomest. We've also spent so damn much time talking about Peggy-as-Natasha, I can't tell you.


End file.
